by Robert Hass
slow-motion of midmorning.
Charlie is exclaiming:
for him it is twenty years ago
and raspberries and Vermont.
We have stopped talking
about L’Histoire de la vérité,
about the subject and object
and the mediation of desire.
our ears are stoppered
in the bee-hum. And Charlie,
laughing wonderfully,
beard stained purple
by the word juice,
goes to get a bigger pot.
THE BEGINNING OF SEPTEMBER
I.
The child is looking in the mirror.
His head falls to one side, his shoulders slump.
He is practicing sadness.
II.
He didn’t think she ought to
and she thought she should.
III.
In the summer
peaches the color of sunrise
In the fall
plums the color of dusk
IV.
Each thing moves its own way
in the wind. Bamboo flickers,
the plum tree waves, and the loquat
is shaken.
V.
The dangers are everywhere. Auxiliary verbs, fishbones, a fine carelessness. No one really likes the odor of geraniums, not the woman who dreams of sunlight and is always late for work nor the man who would be happy in altered circumstances. Words are abstract, but words are abstract is a dance, car crash, heart’s delight. It’s the design dumb hunger has upon the world. Nothing is severed on hot mornings when the deer nibble flower heads in a simmer of bay leaves. Somewhere in the summer dusk is the sound of children setting the table. That is mastery: spoon, knife, folded napkin, fork; glasses all around. The place for the plate is wholly imagined. Mother sits here and Father sits there and this is your place and this is mine. A good story compels you like sexual hunger but the pace is more leisurely. And there are always melons.
VI.
little mother
little dragonfly quickness of summer mornings
this is a prayer
this is the body dressed in its own warmth
at the change of seasons
VII.
There are not always melons
There are always stories
VIII.
Chester found a dozen copies of his first novel in a used bookstore and took them to the counter. The owner said, “You can’t have them all,” so Chester kept five. The owner said, “That’ll be a hundred and twelve dollars.” Chester said, “What?” and the guy said, “They’re first editions, Mac, twenty bucks apiece.” And so Chester said, “Why are you charging me a hundred and twelve dollars?” The guy said, “Three of them are autographed.” Chester said, “Look, I wrote this book.” The guy said, “All right, a hundred. I won’t charge you for the autographs.”
IX.
The insides of peaches
are the color of sunrise
The outsides of plums
are the color of dusk
X.
Here are some things to pray to in San Francisco: the bay, the mountain, the goddess of the city; remembering, forgetting, sudden pleasure, loss; sunrise and sunset; salt; the tutelary gods of Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Basque, French, Italian, and Mexican cooking; the solitude of coffeehouses and museums; the virgin, mother, and widow moons; hilliness, vistas; John McLaren; Saint Francis; the Mother of Sorrows; the rhythm of any life still whole through three generations; wine, especially zinfandel because from that Hungarian vine-slip came first a native wine not resinous and sugar-heavy; the sourdough mother, yeast and beginning; all fish and fisherman at the turning of the tide; the turning of the tide; eelgrass, oldest inhabitant; fog; seagulls; Joseph Worcester; plum blossoms; warm days in January…
XI.
She thought it was a good idea.
He had his doubts.
XII.
ripe blackberries
XIII.
She said: reside, reside
and he said, gored heart
She said: sunlight, cypress
he said, idiot children
nibbling arsenic in flaking paint
she said: a small pool of semen
translucent on my belly
he said maybe he said
maybe
XIV.
the sayings of my grandmother:
they’re the kind of people
who let blackberries rot on the vine
XV.
The child approaches the mirror very fast
then stops
and watches himself
gravely.
XVI.
So summer gives over—
white to the color of straw
dove gray to slate blue
burnishings
a little rain
a little light on the water
NOT GOING TO NEW YORK: A LETTER
Dear Dan—
This is a letter of apology, unrhymed. Rhyme belongs to the dazzling couplets of arrival. Survival is the art around here. It rhymes by accident with the rhythm of days which arrive like crows in a field of stubble corn in upstate New York in February. In upstate New York in February thaws hardened the heart against the wish for spring. There was not one thing in the barren meadows not muddy and raw-fleshed. At night I dreamed of small black snakes with orange markings disappearing down their holes, of being lost in the hemlocks and coming to a clearing of wild strawberry, sunlight, abandoned apple trees. At night it was mild noon in a clearing. Nothing arrived. This was a place left to flower in the plain cruelty of light. Mornings the sky was opal. The windows faced east and a furred snow reassumed the pines but arrived only mottled in the fields so that its flesh was my grandmother’s in the kitchen of the house on Jackson Street, and she was crying. I was a good boy. She held me so tight when she said that, smelling like sleep rotting if sleep rots, that I always knew how death would come to get me and the soft folds of her quivery white neck were what I saw, so that sometimes on an airplane I look down to snow covering the arroyos on the east side of the Sierra and it’s grandmother’s flesh and I look away. In the house on Jackson Street, I am the figure against the wall in Bonnard’s The Breakfast Room. The light is terrible. It is wishes that are fat dogs, already sated, snuffling at the heart in dreams. The table linen is so crisp it puts an end to fantasies of rectitude, clean hands, high art, and the blue beside the white in the striping is the color of the river Loire when you read about it in old books and dreamed of provincial breakfasts, the sun the color of bread crust and the fruit icy cold and there was no terrified figure dwarflike and correct, disappearing off the edge of Bonnard’s The Breakfast Room. It was not grandmother weeping in the breakfast room or the first thaw dream of beautiful small snakes slithering down holes. In this life that is not dreams but my life the clouds above the bay are massing toward December and gulls hover in the storm-pearled air and the last of last season’s cedar spits and kindles on the fire. Summer dries us out with golden light, so winter is a kind of spring here—wet trees, a reptile odor in the earth, mild greening—and the seasonal myths lie across one another in the quick darkening of days. Kristin and Luke are bent to a puzzle, some allegory of the quattrocento cut in a thousand small uneven pieces which, on the floor, they recompose with rapt, leisurely attention. Kristin asks, searching for a piece round at one end, fluted at the other, “Do you know what a shepherd is?” and Luke, looking for a square edge with a sprig of Italian olive in it, makes a guess. “Somebody who hurts sheep.” My grandmother was not so old. She was my mother’s mother; I think, the night before, my father must have told her we were going to move. She held me weeping, probably, because she felt she was about to lose her daughter. We only buried her this year. In the genteel hotel on Leavenworth that looked across a mile of human misery to the bay, she smoked regally, complained about her teeth. Luke watched her wide-eyed, with a mingled l
ook of wonder and religious dread she seemed so old. And once, when he reached up involuntarily to touch her withered cheek, she looked at him awhile and patted his cheek back and winked and said to me, askance: “old age ain’t for sissies.” This has nothing to do with the odd terror in my memory. It only explains it—the way this early winter weather makes life seem more commonplace and—at a certain angle—more intense. It is not poetry, where decay and a created radiance lie hidden inside words the way that memory folds them into living. “o Westmoreland thou art a summer bird that ever in the haunch of winter sings the lifting up of day.” Pasternak translated those lines. I imagine Russian summer, the smell of jasmine drifting toward the porch. I would like to get on a plane, but I would also like to sit on the porch and watch one shrink to the hovering of gulls and glint in the distance, circle east toward snow and disappear. He would have noticed the articles as a native speaker wouldn’t: a bird, the haunch; and understood a little what persists when, eyes half-closed, lattice-shadow on his face, he murmured the phrase in the dark vowels of his mother tongue.
SONGS TO SURVIVE THE SUMMER
It’s funny, isn’t it, Karamazov,
all this grief and pancakes afterwards…
These are the dog days,
unvaried
except by accident,
mist rising from soaked lawns,
gone world, everything
rises and dissolves in air,
whatever it is would
clear the air
dissolves in air and the knot
of day unties
invisibly like a shoelace.
The gray-eyed child
who said to my child: “Let’s play
in my yard. It’s OK,
my mother’s dead.”
Under the loquat tree.
It’s almost a song,
the echo of a song:
on the bat’s back I fly
merrily toward summer
or at high noon
in the outfield clover
guzzling orange Crush,
time endless, examining
a wooden coin I’d carried
all through summer
without knowing it.
The coin was grandpa’s joke,
carved from live oak,
Indian side and buffalo side.
His eyes lustered with a mirth
so deep and rich he never
laughed, as if it were a cosmic
secret that we shared.
I never understood; it married
in my mind with summer. Don’t
take any wooden nickels,
kid, and gave me one
under the loquat tree.
The squalor of mind
is formlessness,
informis,
the Romans said of ugliness,
it has no form,
a man’s misery, bleached skies,
the war between desire
and dailiness. I thought
this morning of Wallace Stevens
walking equably to work
and of a morning two Julys ago
on Chestnut Ridge, wandering
down the hill when one
rusty elm leaf, earth-
skin peeling, wafted
by me on the wind.
My body groaned toward fall
and preternaturally
a heron lifted from the pond.
I even thought I heard
the ruffle of the wings
three hundred yards below me
rising from the reeds.
Death is the mother of beauty
and that clean-shaven man
smelling of lotion,
lint-free, walking
toward his work, a
pure exclusive music
in his mind.
The mother of the neighbor
child was thirty-one,
died, at Sunday breakfast,
of a swelling in the throat.
on a toy loom
she taught my daughter
how to weave. My daughter
was her friend
and now she cannot sleep
for nighttime sirens,
sure that every wail
is someone dead.
Should I whisper in her ear,
death is the mother
of beauty? Wooden
nickels, kid? It’s all in
shapeliness, give your
fears a shape?
In fact, we hide together
in her books.
Prairie farms, the heron
knows the way, old
country songs, herbal magic,
recipes for soup,
tales of spindly orphan
girls who find
the golden key, the
darkness at the center
of the leafy wood.
And when she finally sleeps
I try out Chekhov’s
tenderness to see
what it can save.
Maryushka the beekeeper’s
widow,
though three years mad,
writes daily letters
to her son. Semyon transcribes
them. The pages
are smudged by his hands,
stained with
the dregs of tea:
“My dearest Vanushka,
Sofia Agrippina’s ill
again. The master
asks for you. Wood
is dear. The cold
is early. Poor
Sofia Agrippina!
The foreign doctor
gave her salts
but Semyon says her icon
candle guttered
St. John’s Eve. I am afraid,
Vanya. When she ’s ill,
the master likes to have
your sister flogged.
She means no harm.
The rye is gray
this time of year.
When it is bad, Vanya,
I go into the night
and the night eats me.”
The haiku comes
in threes
with the virtues of brevity:
What a strange thing!
To be alive
beneath plum blossoms.
The black-headed
Steller’s jay is squawking
in our plum.
Thief! Thief!
A hard, indifferent bird,
he’d snatch your life.
The love of books
is for children
who glimpse in them
a life to come, but
I have come
to that life and
feel uneasy
with the love of books.
This is my life,
time islanded
in poems of dwindled time.
There is no other world.
But I have seen it twice.
In the Palo Alto marsh
sea birds rose in early light
and took me with them.
Another time, dreaming,
river birds lifted me,
swans, small angelic terns,
and an old woman in a shawl
dying by a dying lake
whose life raised men
from the dead
in another country.
Thick nights, and nothing
lets us rest. In the heat
of mid-July our lust
is nothing. We swell
and thicken. Slippery,
purgatorial, our sexes
will not give us up.
Exhausted after hours
and not undone,
we crave cold marrow
from the tiny bones that
moonlight scatters
on our skin. Always
morning arrives,
the stunned days,
faceless, droning
in the juice of rotten quince,
the flies, the hea
t.
Tears, silence.
The edified generations
eat me, Maryushka.
I tell them
pain is form and
almost persuade
myself. They are not
listening. Why
should they? Who
cannot save me anymore
than I, weeping
over Great Russian Short
Stories in summer,
under the fattened figs,
saved you. Besides,
it is winter there.
They are trying out
a new recipe for onion soup.
Use a heavy-bottomed
three- or four-quart pan.
Thinly slice six large
yellow onions and sauté
in olive oil and butter
until limp. Pour in
beef broth. Simmer
thirty minutes,
add red port and bake
for half an hour. Then
sprinkle half a cup
of diced Gruyère and cover
with an even layer
of toasted bread and
shredded Samsoe. Dribble
melted butter on the top
and bake until the cheese
has bubbled gold.
Surround yourself with friends.
Huddle in a warm place.
Ladle. Eat.
Weave and cry.
Child, every other siren
is a death;
